


Looking Glass II

by friendly_ficus



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff and Angst, cameos from everybody but it's not About them, star!scanlan and sound engineer!pike What Will They Do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:34:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29484582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: It’s a beautiful Sunday morning in Emon, with a high of 72° and scattered clouds to break up the sun, when Scanlan Shorthalt wakes to three things: his alarm, an email from his manager, and a text from Grog. He checks the text first.Grog:hey scan hope u were srs about LG plz dont sueHe rubs his eyes, flicks over to the email. Attached is a file, LookingGlass.mp4; shaky cellphone footage of a concert, Grog on the drums and some people he doesn’t recognize on guitar and keys. The bass player, haloed in the spotlight with purple streaks in her hair, makes him catch his breath.Here’s a song about a boy,Pike Trickfoot snarls into the microphone, and he recognizes the bassline.
Relationships: Scanlan Shorthalt/Pike Trickfoot
Comments: 8
Kudos: 22





	Looking Glass II

**Author's Note:**

> i understand that you’re supposed to do song titles in quotes honestly i just like italics more so everyone ignore that. also, i'm not sure how music is made or how the music industry works at _all_ so please suspend your disbelief and pop some popcorn, this fic works mostly on movie logic.

It’s a beautiful Sunday morning in Emon, with a high of 72° and scattered clouds to break up the sun, when Scanlan Shorthalt wakes to three things: his alarm, an email from his manager, and a text from Grog. He checks the text first. 

**Grog:** _hey scan hope u were srs about LG plz dont sue_

He rubs his eyes, flicks over to the email. Attached is a file, LookingGlass.mp4; shaky cellphone footage of a concert, Grog on the drums and some people he doesn’t recognize on guitar and keys. The bass player, haloed in the spotlight with purple streaks in her hair, makes him catch his breath.

_Here’s a song about a boy,_ Pike Trickfoot snarls into the microphone, and he recognizes the bassline.

\---

He stays in bed for hours that morning. The tour’s on a break, sales from his sixth album are still going strong, and he’s not really feeling like he can get up and put on an appropriate face for the inevitable press that’ll show up if he goes on a coffee run. He outgrew any kind of bad-boy image four years and two albums ago, so a grumpy snap at a reporter would be less _wow, he’s so edgy_ and more _wow, look at this arrogant jackass._ Might even land him a joke in a late-night monologue. 

Sometimes, Scanlan hates living in Emon. There are people everywhere, everything closes weirdly early, and you have to put on a good face and dress up and talk about your _skincare routine_ to random people on the street who decide it’s the most pressing question of all time. Yeah, this city was a mistake. 

Getting delivery from the Xhorhasian fusion place, though, almost makes it worth it. He wanders to the door in his bathrobe and his delivery driver doesn’t bat an eye, just passes him the rice bowl and takes his tip with a quick thanks. And he tucks in with a fork at his kitchen counter, phone propped up on a stack of napkins, and plays the video again, scribbling out the lyrics on one of said napkins.

_Looking Glass_ was one of his earliest songs, the first slow one to get any radio play. It’s got this longing, whimsical melody; as close to acoustic as anything on his first album got. He’s done piano covers at concerts when he needs to ground everyone, get the crowd low so he can bring them back up. People have tattoos of the lyrics. People have said it’s his most emotional song. His most honest song. It was in three teen movies the summer after it came out, only one of which was an edgy Alice in Wonderland remake.

He looks at the napkin. Pike Trickfoot is not singing _Looking Glass._

_Looking Glass_ | _Looking Glass II_  
---|---  
_I wanna_ | _I gotta_  
_Go back through the looking glass_ | _Break through that looking glass_  
_I wouldn’t mind a future that looks more like the past_ | _I don’t want a future that’s just more of the past!_  
_You're in my reflection but we're fading so fast_ | _I don’t miss you that often and it passes so fast_  
_Oh, let’s go back through the looking glass_ | _I gotta, gotta, gotta break the looking glass_  
  
Her version is invective, fast, _loud._ It’s everything _Looking Glass_ isn’t, shoved out of a miss-you song and into a fuck-you song, making room over the bridge for a shrieking guitar solo. Everyone in the bar is on their feet and they all know the chorus after the first time through it. 

It’s good. It’s _great,_ he’s tapping his foot along already, thinking out a high harmony he’d layer over the top. It’s better than anything on _Glorious._

He freezes. This is better than anything on _Glorious. Glorious,_ his sixth album. His record-breaking album. His going-platinum album. 

He loves that album. He’s proud of that album. He worked his fingers to the bone making that album. 

This is better than anything on it even though Pike’s not a singer, even though anybody who loved _Looking Glass_ would hate this song, even though they’re performing in some crowded no-name bar with terrible acoustics. It feels _different,_ feels _new_ in a way nothing on his album felt.

It’s not that he’d been uninspired. Well, it’s not that he’d _known_ he was uninspired.

He sends Grog a _no problem_ text, emails his manager that any attention on his work is good attention and wanders his way into the shower, singing it at the top of his lungs.

And he saves the file on his laptop, puts it in a folder that’s buried under lyric drafts and demo recordings that stack up like strata. It’s beside one other file.

An old video, long-deleted from the internet—him in Everlight Studios in Westruun, recording his first EP in a room that had egg cartons stapled to the walls. Grog’s in that one, too, yelling opinions about tempo and grinning as he messes up Scanlan’s hair. The Scanlan Shorthalt in that video seems like a stranger, but he can feel a ghost of those old, exaggerated faces he’d pulled to get a laugh from behind the camera. 

Her hair was black back then. She’s kept the purple.

It’s been a very long time.

\---

Two days later, at a meeting about marketing strategies for his next, nonexistent album, Vex sits next to him during the lunch break. 

“Ah, not here to ask you about viral strategies,” she says lightly, preempting his complaints about working during the _break_ part of the meeting. “Are we talking about _it?”_

“There are a lot of _it-_ s you could be referring to,” he grumbles, taking a sip of cherry soda and relishing in the way she winces. 

Vex hates cherry soda. Scanlan makes a point to drink it in front of her.

“You know I get CC'd on most of the emails about ‘internet strategies’,” Vex reminds him, air quotes audible. “I saw that concert video.”

“Oh, that?” Scanlan laughs, like he hasn’t been thinking about that video for the past two days. “Didn’t know it would come up in a marketing meeting.”

“We’re taking our _break,_ darling, and I don’t mean about potential marketing aspects. Are you—” 

“Fine.”

Vex frowns. “You don’t talk about Everlight Studios much. Not really about Westruun at all.”

“It was Grog doing me a favor,” he says, taking another pull of soda. “That’s it.”

“I—Right. Forget I even asked! Do you... want to talk about the next leg of the tour?”

Right, the extended tour for his technically sound, blatantly uninspired album. In a month he’s going back on the road with his team for three more months of shows. It’ll be swell. It’ll be great. He does good writing on the road.

He tells Vex as much, but there’s still a little worried wrinkle in her eyebrows. 

“Just make sure you’re not burning out,” she says at last, gathering her things to go back to her seat. “I think this meeting’s a little premature, personally, but it was on the schedule.”

It was on the schedule because he’s a fast writer and they thought he’d at least have a _theme_ to work with by now, but Vex doesn’t say that. She just pats his shoulder and offers some statistics about social media engagement that derail the rest of the meeting, letting him escape any more questions.

\---

He falls asleep at his piano.

His back’s going to hate him when he wakes up but he keeps at the keys for hours, trying to find something even remotely close to Pike’s song. He can’t even catch the edges of it, falling back into chord progressions he’s favored for the past six albums, unable to disentangle himself. He thinks about calling Vex to bug her husband, the theory professor with too many names, but gives it up when he sees the time.

Nothing comes to him, even after he listens through Kaylie’s latest Dad-Why-Don’t-You-Know-These playlist and stares at the walls. It’s never... he’s never hit a wall like this. Music has always been something that just _happens_ for him.

He falls asleep at the piano. He dreams of Pike at the Westruun airport.

“It’s time to go,” she says, squeezing his hands and grinning. “Call us when you land?”

In the dream he nods. In the dream it feels true.

He wakes up with the _worst_ cramp in his neck, reaching to dial a number he’s pretty sure she doesn’t have anymore.

He’d texted, when he landed, and gotten swept up in meetings and promotional material and interviews and—

He’d missed her wildly, like a punch in the gut, and every time he went to dial her number he missed her more and—

He’s never gone back.

_I gotta, gotta, gotta break the looking glass,_ she sings, furious.

He shakes his head to clear it and _immediately_ regrets the action. Then he texts Grog.

\---

They meet up the next day at a quiet spot, eschewing any of Scanlan’s usual clubs and Grog’s usual gym. Instead they eat dumplings and Grog gets to hear about the _Glorious_ tour and Scanlan gets to hear about the new duo that’s been recording at Everlight.

“Well, duo _now,”_ he says, a trace of a growl in it. At Scanlan’s raised eyebrow, he elaborates. “You saw them in that concert, Slayer’s Take. Zhara and Kashaw. Used to be a trio, but his ex, y’know how it goes.”

“Tough to work together?”

“Tried to run off with their masters, it was fuckin’ nuts. So then they had no bassist, and the drum tracks weren’t together yet, and me and Pike said _fuck it_ and filled in.” Grog inhales a few more dumplings as Scanlan takes that in.

“Must’ve been a difficult first show,” he offers, and Grog shrugs. They’ve both seen weirder things.

“What’re you doing here, anyway. Thought you were touring.” Grog’s watching him, something piercing in his expression. If Scanlan’s guessing right—and he usually is, when it comes to Grog—the big man’s trying to determine if he should worry about him.

Scanlan waves it off, grins. “I’m just resting up, you know, getting stuff ready for the next album over the break.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Messed up my neck taking a weird nap, not as young as I used to be, you know how it is,” he tries.

“Uh-huh.”

This trick has always worked on Scanlan, is the thing; Grog can sit there and agree until the cows come home and Scanlan’ll get frustrated enough with it that he’ll blurt out something he regrets—

“I don’t have anything for the new album,” he says at last, miserable. There it is.

“That sucks.” Grog eats another dumpling.

“It’s never been this tough before,” he sighs, slumping, and Grog raises his eyebrows.

“Pretty sure it has. Remember how many eggs we had to eat, for the old studio walls? I still hate omelets.” 

Scanlan puts his face down on the table and groans, hair narrowly missing the dipping sauce. Grog grumbles and moves it to his side. Then he awkwardly pats Scanlan’s head.

“I know,” he soothes. “And she doesn’t even use egg cartons anymore, has that fancy foam and everything. Our sacrifice, wasted.”

“I haven’t talked to Pike in _ten years,”_ he wails into the tabletop. “And this week I’ve thought about her _every day.”_

“That’s pretty fucked up.” Grog continues patting his head. “If she hadn’t told me to mind my own business, I’d probably punch you.”

“Good to know,” he sighs. “Y’think she hates me?”

“Eh. We don’t really talk about you.”

“Yeah,” he says into the wood. Grog eats the last dumpling.

\---

“You want to go to Westruun.” J’mon Sa Ord sounds entirely unamused. _“Why_ do you want to go to Westruun?”

“Oh, you know, reconnect with my roots. Find my sound again, figure some things out vis-à-vis the new album. I’m really just letting you know as a courtesy,” Scanlan calls to the phone from his closet, throwing shirts toward the open suitcase on the edge of his enormous bed.

A chill goes down Scanlan’s spine. The silence on the other end of the line is arctic.

“I mean... I wanted to discuss it with you? As my manager? Who manages me?” he winces, voice getting a little higher with each word.

“Do you have a studio to work in there or should I find one in the area?” they ask, precise and clipped.

“Everlight,” he blurts, knowing that it’s a bad idea, that it’s a mistake, but it’s got too much momentum in him to stop now. “I want to work with Pike Trickfoot.”

There’s another pause, this one less terrifying. Then they sigh. Scanlan’s pretty good at making people sigh.

“Do what you need to do,” his manager orders. “You have to be back in the city in two weeks so we can get everything in order for the tour. I’ll book the studio time and have someone send over the usual NDAs.”

“Great, thanks— _and_ you hung up. Great.”

It gets cold in Westruun at this time of year. He packs an extra sweater and gets an email with his boarding information, along with a text from Sybil confirming that Kaylie can’t take two weeks off of school and come with him even though she’d love to miss that much. Eighth grade, man.

He wears a hat pulled low over his face to the airport, takes a selfie with a fan on the plane who’s going to visit her grandparents, and stares out the window for four hours. When they land, the sky is a cool gray and there’s a little fog in the air.

Scanlan pulls his coat tighter and checks into his hotel, gets confirmation from J’mon that the studio’s done their end of the paperwork and Pike’ll be there tomorrow at eight to discuss things.

He should write something, he should write _anything_ he can bring into the meeting.

He splays out on the hotel bed, and sleeps.

\---

He wakes up two hours before he means to, stares at the ceiling and thinks about calling his mother. Thinks about her patient hands over his, showing him guitar chords.

It’s definitely too early to call her. She’d answer, and she’d worry, and she’d ask him why he was back in Westruun when he really doesn’t know. 

Instead he watches the local news and makes a shitty cup of coffee in the shitty in-room coffee machine and wanders out to the tiny little balcony, staring over the sleeping town. It wakes up in stages, delivery trucks on the streets and shop lights coming on, smoke and steam slowly rising from chimneys.

Westruun’s bigger than it used to be, but not by much.

He’s changed, anyway. He isn’t that kid with the lucky contract from Tal’Dorei Records sitting in the library fax machine, isn’t the guy teaching kids piano in the back of the music store between coffee shop gigs. He isn’t sitting in Wilhand’s kitchen eating eggs with Grog while Pike goes over the first rental agreement for the studio space.

He drinks the awful coffee and eats a complimentary pastry, picks up his empty notebook and shrugs on his guitar. 

\---

Scanlan arrives at Everlight an hour early, but the security guy lets him in. He’s Scanlan Shorthalt, after all.

It’s different. Everything is, really—posters line the halls of the studio for tours he’s never heard of, and Grog wasn’t lying about the end of the egg cartons. It’s gotten complicated, professional. He steps through a door and starts approaching the soundboards, curious.

“You press a button, you’re a dead man,” says a voice out of his dreams, and he turns.

He sees Pike Trickfoot for the first time in a decade under hallway fluorescents, haloed by the door he hadn’t heard opening. She’s got a thermos in one hand and a laptop bag in the other, to go with the unimpressed look on her face.

“Don’t touch my boards, Shorthalt, I mean it.” He gets the feeling that she means it.

He’s thought about what he’d say, he knows he has. Knows he planned it out in one of his failed brainstorming sessions, branched out all sorts of directions for the conversation to take, knows that he has a dozen stories he can segue into. Of course as soon as he sees her, absolutely none of it comes to mind.

“Your purple...” he says like an _idiot,_ reaching up to tug at his own bangs.

She rolls her eyes a little, moves past him to set her stuff down. He’s sweating for some reason. The clock says it’s only seven thirty, but she rolls a chair over and starts flicking switches.

He stands unmoving in the middle of the control room. She turns to look at him.

“I use hair chalk sometimes, when I wanna have fun. Now, you’re here to make music?”

“Yeah,” he says, mouth dry.

“Well?” She nods at the inner door to the recording room. “Ready?”

“Ready,” he lies, and goes to sit on a stool in front of a microphone with his guitar in his hands, and comes up with absolutely nothing.

They end up working for an excruciating couple hours, his hands slow and stupid. He’s pretty sure she figured out he didn’t have any actual material about five minutes into it, but neither of them are willing to admit it. She sits like a statue in the window, headphones messing up her hair, and records tracks of useless noise for him to go over later.

At ten forty-five, her voice interrupts a take.

“You don’t have a new album,” she almost-asks, and he nods. “Huh. You eat today, Shorthalt?”

_Call me Scanlan,_ he wants to say. _You’ve never not called me Scanlan._

He shakes his head instead of speaking.

“Okay,” she says, “okay, okay, okay. We’ll go get some food.”

And she flips a few switches that shut off the equipment and grabs her jacket, leading him through the long hall of unrecognizable posters out onto the street.

\---

JB Trickfoot is running the Trickfoot Family Diner, he gathers from a picture on the back of the menu. It’s an odd turn, from library sciences to the restaurant business, but Scanlan’s seen weirder.

Weirder like Pike Trickfoot across from him in a booth, stirring the ice around in her water and deciding what to have for an early lunch. Weirder like the way she doesn’t ask why he’s in town after all this time, instead pulling out a pocket notebook of her own and asking what he influences he wants to come through in his untitled seventh album, if there’s anything she should listen to to get an idea of the sound.

_You,_ he almost says, but the waiter comes by to refill their waters and take their orders.

And miraculously, they start talking. About songs they’ve heard recently and old standards, and what he likes from his past albums and what he doesn’t, and session musicians and local talent Pike’s working with. 

She makes notes in her little notebook and he wishes he had his, as they split an appetizer platter. (Well, _split;_ she steals all the curly fries and he hoards mozzarella sticks.)

It feels... different. Not like the old days, but familiar. It’s been a while since he had a collaborator this early on a project, and there’s a thrill to having someone to talk to.

At the end of their lunch, she stands and says she’ll see him in the morning.

“And we’ll get some work done,” she tells him, sounding entirely confident. “We’ve got a start on it now, and it’ll come.”

Then she walks out of the diner, and leaves him with the bill.

\---

Noon in Westruun means nothing to do. He starts walking, breathes in the familiar air.

Eventually he ends up outside Vilya’s Music and, feeling very nostalgic, he goes in.

“Hey there!” a sunny voice calls from the counter. And then, “Wait, _Scanlan?”_

Keyleth stands there, eyes wide as she restocks reed boxes. He remembers her at thirteen, fumbling her way through piano exercises while her dad stood in that exact spot.

“Heya, Keyleth. You guys still sell guitar strings?” 

She looks at him for a moment more before experience kicks in and she pulls out a few packets, talks over brand and material.

While she’s ringing him up, she tilts her head in question. “Are you... back? Don’t you have a tour, like, right now?”

“Not for a few weeks,” he says with a grin. “You going?”

“Yeah,” she says, surprising him. “The first Emon show, in May.”

He blinks. Keyleth knew him when he was nobody, when he didn’t know his way around a stage and _barely_ managed to instill fundamentals like _practicing_ and _using a metronome._

“You... like my music?”

“Well, duh,” she laughs. 

“Your dad still have the piano in the back?” 

She nods, looking mystified, and he talks her into unlocking the practice room. He plays for hours on the old upright, runs through his entire discography with the door wide open, plunks through drum solos and interludes with a kind of ridiculous determination that lets him ignore how most of these songs weren’t built for piano, especially out-of-tune with one busted pedal.

He leaves the shop at seven, triumphant and buzzing after his concert for one. Keyleth watches him with shining eyes, promises to give her dad his greetings, and looks generally like she doesn’t know what to do with herself. 

Yeah, things feel different. He feels _good._

\---

He gets takeout from the diner and goes back to his hotel, digs into a piece of lemon meringue pie and starts scribbling out chord progressions in a blank book of sheet music Keyleth pressed into his hands.

He works for four hours before trying to go to bed. He stares at the ceiling in the dark. He should sleep. He has to meet Pike in eight hours, he should sleep.

He turns on the bedside lamp and reaches for a pen, somehow still tasting the pie, and writes about coming home. He texts Keyleth sometime around three, asking if she still knows the guy with the electric violin.

He can hear the beat in his ears already, low and rumbling and building up. Acceleration, all the way to the end. He texts Grog. 

Pike comes into the studio the next morning with two travel mugs of coffee. There’s cinnamon in his, just like he used to drink it. The taste makes him want to freeze; his sleep-deprived body takes over, gulping it down.

“Thanks,” he gasps, surfacing, and she nods.

“Show me what you’ve got.”

\---

They work at least six hours a day for a week straight. The sound is _there,_ underpinning everything, some mix of joy and grief and homecoming. The lyrics flow without hesitation, the notes coming easy and clear. It feels like _fire._

That’s what most of the songs are about, anyway. He’s not _quite_ heavy-handed enough to outright use any phoenix metaphors, but it’s a close thing. _Getting Warmer_ is a dance number that layers in horns with every chorus, _Burning Notebooks_ an angry break-up that plays with a violin countermelody from Keyleth’s guy, _Candlefire_ a love song about something so fragile he can’t risk saying it aloud.

Every song feels at least half-Pike’s. She sits in the booth and they discuss the changes, the entrances, tricky spots in the music. They argue about synths for three days until she sighs and plays a version of _Smokey Eye_ that he’d never even imagined. It’s like nothing he’s ever done before—he can see the reviews if he closes his eyes, _Shorthalt’s Seventh Album Surprises—_ and it makes his gut clench because it’s proof that she’s been working on it after-hours too.

He finds himself looking at her all the time, between meeting session musicians and rerecording solos. At one point they switch places so she can record some placeholder background vocals; she stares out at him through the studio glass and listens to him singing in her ears, closer than touching.

_Can I be honest,_ he mouths along, _Can I be true?_

_I’m so scared of being me when I’m with you._

_So scared of still being me without you._

“So scared of being me,” she echoes, “me without you.”

And he looks at her and he knows, hey, ten years and he’s still a _little_ gone on her.

\---

Twelve days after he came to Westruun, they’re tentatively done with the eleventh track.

It’s just the two of them in the control room, listening to the song. The last notes fade out, a little intangible. Slipping away like smoke, the end of the album. He can almost see it wisping in the air.

They sit in silence until Pike reaches over, saving this version of the track. His mug is at her elbow, purple and so new that it still has bits of the price tag stuck to the bottom.

“You’re staring at me,” Pike says, closing her laptop. 

“Pike...” he trails off, transfixed by her hands on the mixer. He swallows. “Thinking of the good times, I guess.”

“It’s good. It’s really good, different from your other stuff.” Her voice is shaking, just a little.

He reaches for her hand.

She squeezes his once, twice, a third time—and lets go, swallowing.

“I, I have to. It was really good to see you,” she says, abrupt, and stands. And she’s going for the door to the hallway, she’s going, _why_ is she just _going—_

“Wait—Pike! Did I do something wrong?” He stands too, catches the door before it can close behind her. She stops halfway down the long hallway.

“Did you—did you do something _wrong?_ Oh, I don’t know!” She clenches her fists, whirling back around to face him. “I don’t know!”

“If you don’t like something with the album—”

 _"The album is great,”_ she thunders, furious. “It’s not about the _album,_ you ass, you haven’t talked to me in _ten years!”_

He knows he should say something. Every instinct he has is screaming for him to say something. The words don’t come.

“You left and I’m so _glad_ you made it big, I’m _happy_ for you,” she spits, voice cracking, “but you can’t show up out of the blue and just—just make music with me and _look_ at me like that.”

“Like what?” There’s static in his ears. His lips are numb.

“Like you _love_ me!”

He can’t, he doesn’t know what to say. He knows he’s gaping like a fish, staring at her under the harsh lights. 

“Why did you come here?” she asks, head bowed and fists clenched, each word carefully enunciated. An impassable ten feet down the hall. He feels like his shoes are stuck to the floor.

_“Looking Glass II,”_ he says, overexposed. 

“What.”

“I saw the video of the Slayer’s Take concert,” each word is dragged out of him on a hook, “and I just, I wanted to see you.”

She laughs, hollow. “Well, you saw me. Guess I’ll see you around sometime in the next decade.”

And she leaves, and he doesn’t stop her.

\---

J’mon is pleased with the new music. Everyone is at the label—turns out Keyleth’s violin dude is Vex’s brother, small world, he must’ve missed the resemblance because he was busy looking at somebody else—and they get to work drafting marketing strategies and choosing what to release as singles.

He says he wants to wait on promoting it, wants to focus on the tour, and shuts down any questions about anything new. Mercifully, they agree with the strategy.

He sends Grog an _i fucked up_ text, gets an _uh-huh_ in return and doesn’t continue the conversation. There’s a song from Slayer’s Take on Kaylie’s new Dad-Why-Don’t-You-Know-These playlist. 

He buries himself in the tour, refreshing himself on the choreography and coming up with small changes from the original staging that he’s sure drive everyone crazy. The work is good. The work feels like it should feel good, like everyone’s putting on a good show, and people love it, people are still singing along.

Five weeks after he left Westruun, at the first show in Emon, he gives a shout-out to all his old friends in the crowd and knows Keyleth’s out there screaming back at him. 

He makes sure she gets a backstage pass and pulls her away, makes sure somebody brings her tea to drink in the dressing room while he changes into sweatpants and melts into a puddle of make-up remover and sweat on the couch.

“Keyleth,” he says at last, once they’ve caught up and he’s had two bottles of water, “I think I fucked up.”

“Okay.” She’s calm, using the same voice she talks kids through different guitar strings with. “What happened?”

And he explains the whole tangle of it, his seventh album and _Looking Glass II_ and how he can’t hear any of the new songs without hearing Pike, how he missed her so much, for so long, and it had been so good to be near her again that he hadn’t even thought about all the time they were apart. 

“Well,” Keyleth says, listening to _Smokey Eye_ from his phone speaker, “you didn’t invent fucking up. What are you gonna do?” 

“What?” 

“What’re you gonna do about it?”

He thinks of Pike’s voice cracking, the tight line of her spine as she walked out of her own studio. He thinks of how happy he’d been, delirious enough with it that he ignored all the awkwardness, eager to avoid talking about the time he spent away. She’d never brought it up, not even alluded to it, and he’d just gone along ignoring it.

“I don’t... I dunno,” he says, looking at the ceiling of the dressing room. “She was pretty angry.”

“Yeah...” Keyleth trails off meaningfully. “And?”

“I could, I could maybe talk to her about it.”

“Yes.” 

He looks at Keyleth, and she’s smiling.

\---

It takes him two weeks to work up the nerve. Scanlan knows he’s a coward.

But two weeks later in Kymal, he dials the number he’s known for ten years. She picks up.

“Why did you write it? _Looking Glass II.”_

“I hadn’t seen you in eight years,” she sighs, the connection crackling. “You did this interview for the Darrington Show.”

“Tary likes the early stuff.”

“Yeah. And he asked you about _Looking Glass_ and the first EP and you said—”

“It’s a song about a girl,” he remembers. “All the early ones are songs about a girl.”

“Yeah. And I just... I was mad.”

“Yeah.” Scanlan sits on his hotel balcony. Asleep, Kymal almost looks like home.

“I’m not... I’m not a song about a girl.”

“Yeah.”

“We weren’t ever gonna perform it,” she says, sounding tired, “but Kash and Zhara needed something to end the set with and I figured, fuck it. Grog said you wouldn’t care.”

“It’s good,” he tells her, thinking of the way it consumed him, thinking of the crowd around the stage and Pike with purple streaks in her hair.

“Yeah.”

“I mean it, it’s really good. I liked it a lot.”

“Yeah.”

There’s a minute where neither of them say anything. It’s quiet in Kymal tonight. It’s probably quiet in Westruun. He doesn’t know if she’s at home or at the studio or somewhere else, didn’t ask because he was too busy being surprised that she picked up the phone.

“Scanlan, you can’t—” She stops, makes a frustrated sound. “I’m not some statue sitting on a shelf. I didn’t spend a decade staying the same. And when I’m with you, you just... you stir everything back up.”

“I miss you.” He watches the lights of a lonely car weaving through the streets below. The wind isn’t blowing with any real strength, but he feels raw.

“I miss you, too. Don’t wait ten years to call again.”

“How’s next week sound?”

“What?”

“For me to call again. How’s Monday?”

“It’s Saturday,” Pike says, a little bit of a laugh in her voice.

“Yeah, like I said, next week.” _Say yes,_ he wants to beg, _say yes._

He bites his tongue, listens to her breathe.

“Okay,” she says at last, soft. “Okay. Call me Monday.”

And he does.

\---

> Shorthalt’s Seventh Album Stuns: Post- _Homefires_ Thoughts From The Man Himself
> 
> We meet Scanlan Shorthalt in a Westruun diner, demolishing an order of mozzarella sticks and boxing up some curly fries to go. He’s talking Everlight Studios, appetizers, and what’s next for his career—along with the surprising song that brought him back to his roots.
> 
> [To continue reading, subscribe to _Emon Beats_ for all your music news!]

**Author's Note:**

> me pointing at scanlan and pike: they're in love, your honor  
> me pointing at the table i learned to make in ao3 for this fic: i am accepting awards for infographic design at this time  
> but seriously, this fic was a bunch of fun to write and i hope it was good to read! it's definitely my first try writing a modern au and i hope it was entertaining. i just believe that Pikelan.  
> leave a comment and let me know what you think, i really treasure them!!


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